The uses of trust: why did the East Asian development path differ from the Latin American one?

In the last fifteen years of the twentieth century cultural variables, among which trust, have reappeared as factors explaining the rapidity or sluggishness of economic development. The amount of trust that citizens have in each other and in the institutions of their society is regarded as social capital, and the assumption is that such capital makes cooperation of all kinds easier and thus contributes to development. Fukuyama and Putnam argue that trust in other people promotes economic growth. La Porta et al. show quantitatively that trust strongly influences variables such as the efficiency of the judiciary, the quality of the bureaucracy, tax compliance and others, but correlates only weakly, though positively, with growth. ¹